BT, Arty & Nadia Ali – Must Be The Love [Armind]

In what is nothing short of a collaboration of epic proportions, BT, Arty, and Nadia Ali‘s track Must Be The Love was released today on Armin Van Buuren‘s Armind, an imprint of Armada Records. Ripped versions of Must Be The Love have been circulating now for quite some time, but it is not until now we see a proper release for the song.

What is truly impressive about this collaboration is that it extends past solely a song for a club or festival. This is more of a timeless record that fans will still be listening to for years to come. Must Be The Love‘s intro sounds a lot like BT’s work on his album, This Binary Universe; slow, melodic and emotional notes. This, paired with Nadia Ali’s smooth, sexy voice create a blissful atmosphere for the track that continues to the end.

Must Be The Love on Beatport

Here’s what BT had to say about the track:

Dear All,

I am very excited to share with you the first single from my forthcoming #EDM album on @Armadamusic. This song, a collaboration with Arty and Nadia, began several years ago in demo form when I emailed a rough track to Nadia. After several months of riffing back and forth on lyrical notes and counterpoint lines, I began the lengthy and arduous task of comping together a meaningful and poignant vocal. I often compare this process to pointillism in art. It takes an extraordinary amount of time, but in the end when it’s worth it, it’s well worth it.

This track then sat on my proverbial studio shelf for about 18months. During this time, one of the myriad of pieces I was composing was a 6/4 64 bpm orchestral composition that had these protracted movements of cello, vibraphone, metalaphone and handbells. It occurred to me, somewhere I think I have a vocal, in a related key and tempo / signature. I dug around on the server and bingo…dorian it was. Nadia’s vocal was a near perfect fit and worked amazingly with some of the orchestral and small instrument (TBU style) orchestration.

Enter…Arty. At this time Arty and I had been talking over DM on Twitter about collaborating on a track together. I sent him both the vocal and orchestral things we’d written and he sent me back beautiful percolating and driving percussion, an incredible undulating tresillo ostinato synth line and a beautiful drop.

This part of the process began to culminate during this summer. As I was beginning to dig in to Trevor Wisharts brilliant new version of CDP. For those of you that don’t know, CDP is a command based DSP programing language that calls opcodes and commands in either OSX terminal or DOS. I’ve been using it in both for many years but this track is the first time I’ve really gotten my hands dirty so to speak, on something as prominent as a vocal and Nadia’s provided the perfect clay. After about 100+ hours of pure sound design, spectral blurring..distort repeating and the epic PSOW and modify brassage, you can hear the results of these sonic transformations throughout “Must be the Love”, most notably at the very beginning. I for one have never heard anything like this.

More than anything, this is a beautiful and simple song that speaks directly to me, and I hope to you as well. After all, music is first and foremost a language to speak the unspoken directly from breathing life form to breathing life form.

Thanks for listening.
Always,
_BT

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